


Before You Were Born the World Was Still New

by Zagzagael



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Tumblr Prompt, obviously?, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-13 00:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10503066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: http://rumbelleprompts.tumblr.com/anonymous  asked:Instead of giving Gideon the memory tea, Rumple turns him back into an infant.I've been thinking the very same thing for the past few Season 6 episodes. So this prompt urged me to explore this. Thank you, anon!





	

It wasn’t going to be easy. And it would come with a price. A price he would have to pay but he had grown used to the inevitable cost of things after aeons of having payment extracted. Eventually, quite obviously, the fee would be the reckoning, costing him everything . But that was life, after all, and death always seemed to have a hand in the deals the living made, the magic they brewed, the spells they cast, and the tears they wept either in joy or grief. 

But now wasn’t the time to ponder life and death. It was birth he was after. Or, more specifically, a birth. He had doused the tea with memory potion, that bit was complete. The manchild sleeping off the last vestiges of the cruelty of his stolen youth. Let him sleep, he thought, it seemed restful and the boy looked just like his mother in repose. All sharp angles in the face, all softness about the lips. He was glad their child took after his mother. 

He wanted it to remain that way. But they had to do this right this time. Start over and do the bloody thing as right as one could with a thimbleful of knowledge. Of the future, of destinies, circumstance and luck. Belle deserved it. Gideon deserved it. 

He himself deserved nothing more than utter dissolution, chalky ash of his burnt bones thrown to the four winds, but the Fates hadn’t seen to it. Yet. So he squared his shoulders, fetched the golden shears of destiny, and the spelled hourglass. It was dark magic. Of course it was. But the only one whose heart would pay the price was the one whose heart already beat in shadows. His.

And it wasn’t as though he were turning the clock back on everyone, on Storybrooke. There was no need. This time he was opening the clock case and dialing the hands backwards for a single person, his own flesh and blood. For Gideon. 

The acceleration potion had been doctored. The incantation uttered. Another cuppa. He smirked as he set the kettle on the hob, thinking of all the magicked cups of tea that had been brewed throughout the ages. 

Gideon asleep, forgetting while his dreams played in reverse before disapaearing into the aether. Let another Dark One find the tattered things and weave another’s destiny. This was his and Belle’s child and he wasn’t going to give up control again. 

As soon as she had swallowed the last of it, she knew. He watched her grasp the brass ring of it. Startled, turning towards him with fear and then elation. Gideon’s form was shimmering away, in proportion to Belle’s pregnancy growing. Moments became a see-saw between mother and child, until it was Belle upon the bed groaning out her pain at the imminent birth. 

Quickly, Rumple climbed up behind her, his knees slotting beneath her arms, their fingers entwining. She was panting and he crooned something unintelligible into her ear, the words not mattering just the soothing sound of the burr of his voice, the reassurance of his presence. She leaned her beautiful head back into the crook of his throat and she called out his name. 

Not me, Belle, don’t call for me. Call our son. 

So she did. She sang his name out and the babe answered, crying for his momma. For his poppa. 

Ya did it, Belle. He’s here. 

She had reached down between her thighs and pulled the child from her body, he was in her arms, on her breast and she was weeping. Tears of joy. And she was not a stupid woman, so tears of grief, as well. 

Rumplestiltskin slid off the bed and fetched the shears. The cord had finished pulsing, white and twisting out of Belle's body and into Gideon's body, from origin to new life. Mother to child. But he knew full well he had had his part in it, too. He reached down with one hand and tugged the navel string taught. With a single effort, recompense forgotten in the moment, he snipped and cut clean through.


End file.
